Interning at Haynes Whaley Associates as a “wanna-be” engineer is exciting at moments, like when finding a set of plans hidden in the back corner of your office and realizing that they make some sense after only a few days of engineering; awesome at others, like when you stand at the corner of the north conference room and look down and get crazy vertigo, or when the company buys you lunch; difficult and confusing, like when Derick gives me his college text book to read; and busy, like when Derick gives me some hundred articles to catalog. A typical day of interning includes all the above. My name is Tony Knapp. I am a Senior at Kinkaid and one of two interns currently at Haynes Whaley Associates, Inc. I am here to describe what I do in a typical day at the office.

I arrive at 8:30 each morning and start reading engineering magazines or textbooks, or glance over old plans and see if they made any more sense today than they did yesterday. The plans are a lot like puzzles, each day I learn another thing about Engineering, which is like finding another piece of the puzzle, and the plans make more sense. It’s a thoroughly gratifying process.

At some point Derick pokes his head in, tells us who we (Daniel Tepper is the other intern) are meeting that day, and then we watch Derick take on some marketing errand, be it a conference call, editing a brochure, or setting up a lunch date. Eventually we are sent back to our office with a simple task, like cataloging newspaper articles, or more engineering reading, which (frankly) isn’t so simple, or looking up who’s who in the development world. We may go sit in on a meeting for marketing, or we may go meet with someone in the office and talk to them about what they do, or what project they are working on now.

So far we have met with Virginia (accounting), Marco (engineering), Wally (engineering), Robert (Chief Operating Officer), and though we have not yet met with Amy (marketing), I think I know what she and Kim do because we see them all of the time while shadowing Derick.

The day ends with more Derick-shadowing, another hour or so spent doing marketing chores or engineering reading, and then a satisfying but chilly walk to my car, and a perfectly straight drive home (I make one turn on my entire drive home).